ch, and is able
to do it into English elegantly and accurately without any trace of
foreign idiom. This is no easy thing; for our general experience has
been that translators read French like Englishmen and write English like
Frenchmen.

* * * * *

_Country Life_. By R. MORRIS COPELAND. Boston: John P. Jewett & Company.
1859.

In an article on "Farming Life in New England," published in a former
volume of the "Atlantic," a valued contributor drew attention to the
painful lack of beauty in the lives and homes of our rural population.
Some attempts were made to show that his statements were exaggerated;
but we are satisfied that they were true in all essential particulars.
The abolition of entails, (however wise in itself,) and the consequent
subdivision of estates, will always put country life, in the English
sense of the words, out of the question here. Our houses will continue
to be tents; trees, without ancestral associations, will be valued by
the cord; and that cumulative charm, the slow result of associations, of
the hereditary taste of many generations, must always be wanting. Age is
one of the prime elements of natural beauty; but among us the love of
what is new so predominates, that we have known the largest oak in a
county to be cut down by the selectmen to make room for a shanty
schoolhouse, simply because the tree was of "no account," being hollow
and gnarled, and otherwise delightfully picturesque. Our people are
singularly dead also to the value of beauty in public architecture; and
while they clear away a tree which the seasons have been two centuries
in building, they will put up with as little remorse a stone or brick
abomination that shall be a waking nightmare for a couple of centuries
to come. But selectmen are not chosen with reference to their knowledge
of Price or Ruskin.

Mr. Copeland's book is specially adapted to the conditions of a
community like ours. Its title might have been "Rural AEsthetics for Men
of Limited Means, or the Laws of Beauty considered in their Application
to Small Estates." It is a volume happily conceived and happily
executed, and meets a palpable and increasing want of our civilization.
Whatever adds grace to the daily lives of a people, and awakens in them
a perception of the beauty of outward Nature and its healthful reaction
on the nature of man,--whatever tends to make toil unsordid, and to put
it in relations of intelligent sympathy